The Male Harley Quin - Whaaaaaat?

The same client that has me working on a Casey Jones Mask also has another piece he wants made. This one is going to be very interesting to work on. I am not always happy to see some lanky dude crossplaying a power-puff girl with his package hanging out but this is one of those cross-plays that I can appreciate. The guy dresses up as a male version of Harley Quinn. Before you think of skin tight jumpsuit and pom poms instead check out a picture of him in his attire

so hes over at my place checking out the Casey mask and of course he brought a case of Newcastle. And I had a big bottle of Makers Mark. at one point im in the garage working on casey, drunk as a dog. Pretty much a blur the rest of the night. I wake up the next morning and he tells me "so dude were you serious about me coming over this sunday to work." Of course I am not going to be caught as if I was unaware so I say, yea sure come on over. Come to find out it was his harley quinn mask that I had drunkenly agreed to do so without further ado enjoy :)

so we ended up buying the alginate acrobat, smooths ons alginate acrobat is a non toxic compound that you use to do lifecasting, the benefit of the acrobat over the standard alginate is that it is fiber reinforced to help the alginate not run all over the place. As you can see I failed to mix this nearly enough for the fibers to be evenly dispersed throughout the alginate. The mold ended up working fine but I received non of the benefits that normally accompany alginate acrobat, instead it just slurried all over the place and I did my best to keep the majority of it near his head. The end result was a well "plastered" face and residue left all over my old computer chair.

After this was finished I made a plaster cast of his face and began sculpting once it was dry enough.

there was another image of the finished sculpt all smoothed out. The clay I use is an oil based clay called plasteline. Its fairly inexpensive and bricks of it can be bought from local art supply stores like Michaels and Joanns. A problem with the oil based clay is smoothing it out for casting, I have found that some paint prep spray which is usually used to clean off oil residue from a surface before painting works amazingly well. This depends how detailed your clay sculpt is but for this mask, its so simple I actually just kept spraying the whole mask with the spray to melt the surface of the clay and I would smooth it out with tools/fingers. It works extremely well and because the spray itself is not an oil it doesnt cause problems later on when painting.

I apologize for not taking more pictures of this process, but you end up covered in orange goo and I like my electronic devices enough not to cake them in the stuff.

I will post pictures when I finish this, for now I need to go finish casey jones for wondercon.